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If you like Fate the Patreon is a big deal and helps Evil Hat keep putting out more supplements in their Worlds of Fate line since that money goes to art and writing (and possibly some to Fred for layout, I don't know what the split is). At $4 a release you even get preview docs when available for upcoming releases. Honestly I prefer the Patreon model over the Kickstarter model for customer supported releases for TG stuff, but for big projects like board games and minis games I can see where KS would work better.
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Feb 15, 2017 18:30
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Evil Mastermind posted:The Fate Core KS just sent out the final version of Dresden Files Accelerated, leaving only Shadow of the Century to be delivered. This is the only RPG Kickstarter I ever backed - I don't role play much any more - and I'm glad for this update because I lost the original link without ever downloading it.
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Feb 15, 2017 18:52
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Just saw that there's a Black Orchestra 2nd Edition up on KS. It looks like something I'd really like - anyone play it? Seems like a very safe one to back as far as actually getting it goes.
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Feb 15, 2017 20:18
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Jedit posted:This is the only RPG Kickstarter I ever backed - I don't role play much any more - and I'm glad for this update because I lost the original link without ever downloading it. As much as I dislike FATE as a game system, Evil Hat's level of support and dedication to quality is fantastic and admirable.
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Feb 15, 2017 20:41
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Ratpick posted:Well, since we're seeing a resurgence in the popularity of tabletop RPGs in general it was only inevitable that people who started with Pathfinder/D&D 5e started realizing that those games have their fair share of problems and instead of finding something else to play have decided to try to reinvent the wheel. So I think you could make an argument along the following lines that there are four distinct waves of Heartbreakers: I think you can make an argument that all hearbreakers trace their lineage back to a single set of books: The Arduin Grimoire. And it's existence places the inception of the first wave of Hearbreakers in 1977. You can remove Tekumel/EotPT and RuneQuest from the discussion of Heartbreakers because there exists serious evidence that both of those games had been persistent nascent ideas in their creators heads until D&D actually gave them the concrete evidence of how to make the idea of interactive fiction games a reality. You can also remove Tunnels & Trolls and Chivalry and Sorcery from the category because they were designed not with the idea of "fixing" D&D but instead with the idea of designing a competing product with it's own appeal (solo play and accessibility and a focus on realistic settings and more realistic combat respectively). Arduin was the first time where a group who was created around D&D looked at the rules and said "We can change this, we can fix this, we can MAKE ALL THE PROBLEMS GO AWAY WITH MOOOOORE RUUUUUUUUULES". But what makes Arduin important to Heartbreakers is that it codified the most important aspect of them: the inability to escape the D&D idea space when designing rules. Even when it became it's own game it realistically was still just D&D with poo poo renamed because the designers just took the way things function in D&D as a rule for all RPGs instead of being aspects of one specific one. The second wave comes at the very tail end of the 1970s and the start of the 1980s, specifically with the release of Rolemaster. This is the start of the idea that while the concept of D&D is the bestest ever, the system is so broken that you need to do a back to the board rework to add in MORE REALISM and more importantly MORE RULES. Percentile dice systems have always been very attractive to Heartbreakers because of their mathematical air and general rulesyness. This is also where the Heartbreaker obsession with violence = realism comes from since these types of games tend to feature an abundance of percentile based limb hit tables. These trends basically lead to most of the big famous heartbreakers and continue until really the late 90's and the advent of 3rd Edition. The Third wave would come into being around third edition. This is the rules butchery period where you have guys publishing books that attempt to make 3rd edition D&D do everything under the sun even though the system was in no way designed to do the kinds of things they want it to do. AEG's line of D&D books is the absolute worst example of this, just consisting of pages and pages of endless additional rules, dozens of classes, dozens of races and little thought put into them other than "D&D NEEDS TO DO MORE". Eventually you get games like Arcana Unearthed and World of Darkness that are D&D in name only, coming to a peak with Book of Nine Swords which is maybe the only time a company has come close to publishing a Heartbreaker for a game they already make! It's also worth noting that a lot of companies still made second wave style heartbreakers throughout most of 3 and 3.5 but almost all of them got either vortexted into D&D by becoming 3rd ed supplements or in more nefarious ways (other companies trying to copy the idea of the OGL for one example). And now I think we're in the fourth wave, which is the nostalgic/revivalist wave. Which is primarily made up of people looking at whatever the current edition of D&D is (be it 5th, Pathfinder, etc) and deciding that it's bullshit simple trash for knuckle draggers and instead deciding to revive the concepts and ideas of an older edition that they perceive as more legitimate. So right now more than ever I think the modern Heartbreaker is based on people chasing the dragon of whatever they see as the platonic ideal of an RPG. Obviously some of them are much more Heartbreakery than others. I think in the modern day we've moved beyond just the simple idea of Heartbreakers being about meat and potato rules and instead are in the place where they are based on the ethos that surrounds your product. Everything from the OSR to Torchbearer is sort of a demi-Heartbreaker where the goal isn't to fix the problem by changing everything it's to fix the problem by bringing everything back to whenever it was perceived as being the best and good. We've moved from the Reganomics of the 3.5 era to the modern era of MAKE D&D GREAT AGAIN.
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Feb 15, 2017 21:07
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Titanforge just launched a project for a system agnostic 28mm fantasy Japanese army that works suspiciously well with Kings of War, down to the base sizes and rank setups in the renders.
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Feb 15, 2017 21:08
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Peas and Rice posted:As much as I dislike FATE as a game system, Evil Hat's level of support and dedication to quality is fantastic and admirable. Absolutely. They are a great company, and I will support them even though I can't stand their flagship game.
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Feb 15, 2017 22:40
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El Estrago Bonito posted:So I think you could make an argument along the following lines that there are four distinct waves of Heartbreakers: I think you're painting with such a broad brush that it renders the term "heartbreaker" meaningless. Certainly, D&D has had such an outsized impact on the hobby that there are traces of it in nearly every game. But if that makes everything from GURPS to WoD a heartbreaker, but not T&T, I'm not sure this makes any sense. Not to mention that "heartbreaker" is also often taken to specifically refer to some untenable financial effort to start what amounts to a self-important cover band.
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Feb 16, 2017 01:30
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Heartbreakers must have a bad ROI on money and or time spent.
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Feb 16, 2017 03:47
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I've already started work on a Far West heartbreaker that will be completed in 2022 and sells for .0001 bitscoins.
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Feb 16, 2017 04:04
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LongDarkNight posted:I've already started work on a Far West heartbreaker that will be completed in 2022 and sells for .0001 bitscoins. It can't be a heartbreaker if it's released first.
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Feb 16, 2017 05:47
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To be honest, the idea of mixing cowboys and martials artists is cool enough that I'm surprised someone hasn't stole it and made their own game yet. March contest?
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Feb 16, 2017 06:22
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Just play feng shui 2, hide the metaplot and limit the playbooks.
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Feb 16, 2017 06:33
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Covok posted:To be honest, the idea of mixing cowboys and martials artists is cool enough that I'm surprised someone hasn't stole it and made their own game yet. We all saw Shanghai Noon, dude.
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Feb 16, 2017 06:38
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Covok posted:To be honest, the idea of mixing cowboys and martials artists is cool enough that I'm surprised someone hasn't stole it and made their own game yet. Deadlands exists.
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Feb 16, 2017 06:41
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El Estrago Bonito posted:MAKE D&D GREAT AGAIN. I was considering making this very post, but you did it all for me, and probably much more accurately too, so thanks a lot for that!
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Feb 16, 2017 07:04
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Dream Pod 9 of Heavy Gear fame put up their Jovian Wars space ship minis game project; might be a little late to the space party, but they definitely have a unique aesthetic compared to all of the others, very Nexus: The Jupiter Incident
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Feb 16, 2017 09:54
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That Old Tree posted:I think you're painting with such a broad brush that it renders the term "heartbreaker" meaningless. Certainly, D&D has had such an outsized impact on the hobby that there are traces of it in nearly every game. But if that makes everything from GURPS to WoD a heartbreaker, but not T&T, I'm not sure this makes any sense. Not to mention that "heartbreaker" is also often taken to specifically refer to some untenable financial effort to start what amounts to a self-important cover band. I think the thing that codifies something as a heartbreaker is that it starts from a base game and it tries to fix that game by using more of that game. I wouldn't call GURPS or oWoD heartbreakers because they escaped the game space of D&D in the process of trying to fix problems with D&D style RPGs. What's important with heartbreakers is that they look at something like D&D's unrealistic combat and weird armor mechanics and instead of saying something like "what if we wrote a more narrative focused combat system based mostly on pools of successes and let what actually happens in the combat be solely described by the players and not dictated by things like set maneuvers" or "what if we made a combat system that could add or subtract rules allowing players to have the precise amount of crunch they feel fits their group and setting" they instead go "what rules can we add to [insert base game here] to make the combat the most realistic". The kind of thinking that looks at firearms rules and instead of thinking "how can we make this function as a fun aspect of a game" instead produces the Spycraft effect of having an entire page of assault rifle stat blocks that are all almost identical except for extremely minor stat differences that are rendered almost meaningless by standard dice rolling variance. And I did say that all in relation to D&D because, realistically, 99.9% of all heartbreakers are born from a small group of die hard gamers with little to no technical or games writing experience thinking that because they have played so much D&D they can some how fix it. It's almost always D&D specifically because there's something about D&D specifically that attracts people to do that to it. the argument I was trying to get at/allude to in the end there was that we've moved past the idea of the heartbreaker and instead of it being about the specifics of fixing games it's become a broader movement about fixing the idea of games.So it's not just "oh we're going to fix a game" it's "we're going to fix ALL GAMES by returning to whatever concept of RPGs was born in my formative years of interacting with them". Not to bring up Torchbearer again but if you were ever going to really douche out and make a case for something being post-Heartbreaker that's it. Because it's a game that actually, well, does it. It's a game written by a small group of people that takes an established idea (basic D&D) and not only fixes it from a purely mechanical standpoint, it fixes it by making a game that actively builds the kinds of narratives that speak to peoples memory of being twelve and pigging out on Jolt Cola and Fritos while using your MUSCLE and Monster in My Pocket figures as D&D minis in your best friends musty basement. It's the Stranger Things of RPGs, it puts you back in a specific place and time by not only capturing that time perfectly but also by evoking and using the things from that time that have endured and become part of pop culture memory.
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Feb 16, 2017 10:03
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El Estrago Bonito posted:I think the thing that codifies something as a heartbreaker is that it starts from a base game and it tries to fix that game by using more of that game. The thing that actually codifies a heartbreaker, at least as per the original definition, is twofold. It's a game made by someone too locked into thinking in terms of a single game, generally D&D, so that part is what people tend to remember the most, "heartbreakers are lovely D&D knockoffs," but the other part that's supposed to make them heartbreaking is that somewhere in there buried amidst aelyfs and duarves and 50 all new classes and a skill system that uses 3d100 resolution, is supposed to be something that's genuinely interesting, creative, and/or imaginative, something that makes you realize that the guy making the game actually has some innovative ideas peaking out here and there That's what's supposed to be the heartbreaking thing, not that some dude blew five figures on a vanity print run of an elfgame that's going to molder in his garage unsold, it's that if they could get beyond idea that RPGs all orbit around D&D that they could actually create something interesting instead of yet another race-and-class fantasy game.
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Feb 16, 2017 10:42
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Kai Tave posted:The thing that actually codifies a heartbreaker, at least as per the original definition, is twofold. It's a game made by someone too locked into thinking in terms of a single game, generally D&D, so that part is what people tend to remember the most, "heartbreakers are lovely D&D knockoffs," but the other part that's supposed to make them heartbreaking is that somewhere in there buried amidst aelyfs and duarves and 50 all new classes and a skill system that uses 3d100 resolution, is supposed to be something that's genuinely interesting, creative, and/or imaginative, something that makes you realize that the guy making the game actually has some innovative ideas peaking out here and there That's what's supposed to be the heartbreaking thing, not that some dude blew five figures on a vanity print run of an elfgame that's going to molder in his garage unsold, it's that if they could get beyond idea that RPGs all orbit around D&D that they could actually create something interesting instead of yet another race-and-class fantasy game. Yeah, I was about to type something to this effect myself. The thing that made these games "hearbreakers" was the fact that there was at least one genuinely good idea that broke the mold in each and it would've been great to see those creative ideas applied in a system other than one made with no awareness of gaming outside of D&D and furthermore no awareness of fantasy outside of D&D. Having just reread the original article it's interesting that a lot of these "innovations" in the games in question were in the games' magic systems, whether it was allowing for players to craft their own spells, having essentially freeform spells that could be improvized provided they fit into certain keywords, or allowing for modifying spells on the fly. The more we talk about this thing the more I actually want to go ahead and try to write my own heartbreaker just because.
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Feb 16, 2017 11:31
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That Old Tree posted:I think you're painting with such a broad brush that it renders the term "heartbreaker" meaningless. Certainly, D&D has had such an outsized impact on the hobby that there are traces of it in nearly every game. But if that makes everything from GURPS to WoD a heartbreaker, but not T&T, I'm not sure this makes any sense. Not to mention that "heartbreaker" is also often taken to specifically refer to some untenable financial effort to start what amounts to a self-important cover band. For what it's worth, I think the World of Darkness book that was mentioned is the D20 OGL World of Darkness book. Which is much more different from the World of Darkness games proper than you might expect.
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Feb 16, 2017 14:54
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TG Kickstarter Thread 3: RPG General Chat Thread
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Feb 16, 2017 15:13
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Got an email yesterday that Giant Killer Robots: Heavy Hitters is coming to KSer in a week or so. I am curious on the product differences then what I saw at Gen Con. Also games made by WETA.
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Feb 16, 2017 16:19
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Another big 'but why?'. The Terminator: The Board Game has launched. The campaign page does reveal this gem however: quote:Lynnvander is responsible for "The Legacy Series (Albion’s, Neverland’s and Sherwood’s)" and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Board Game” as well as the up and coming 2017 releases; “Cowboy Bebop”, “Dragon Ball Z”, “The Terminator”, “Galaxy Quest” and “Dark Stalkers Vs Street Fighter” board games. Technically the Buffy game is also up and coming.
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Feb 16, 2017 16:30
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NTRabbit posted:Dream Pod 9 of Heavy Gear fame put up their Jovian Wars space ship minis game project; might be a little late to the space party, but they definitely have a unique aesthetic compared to all of the others, very Nexus: The Jupiter Incident I'm surprised they still exist as anything more than a rights holder.
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Feb 16, 2017 16:33
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The_Doctor posted:Another big 'but why?'. The Terminator: The Board Game has launched. The great thing about all these licensed games is that they don't have to be that good because I'm sure a large percentage of the backers are just getting them for the minis.
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Feb 16, 2017 16:34
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Kwyndig posted:I'm surprised they still exist as anything more than a rights holder. They recently successfully kickstarted, and delivered, a new edition of Heavy Gear Blitz, with really great quality hard plastic minis.
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Feb 16, 2017 16:55
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Evil Mastermind posted:The great thing about all these licensed games is that they don't have to be that good because I'm sure a large percentage of the backers are just getting them for the minis. I'll admit my first thought about a Terminator board game was "Ohh, Terminator minis. I wonder if they'll be tabletop scale?"
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Feb 16, 2017 17:03
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I like the idea of events in the past board change the future board's events, but they still don't have a gameplay video up. And I kinda want the Terminator skeleton minis. 
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Feb 16, 2017 17:44
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Hitlers Gay Secret posted:I like the idea of events in the past board change the future board's events, but they still don't have a gameplay video up. Terminator Genisys by Warlord Games has some nice minis. Should be rather cheap to find.
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Feb 16, 2017 18:22
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Mr.Trifecta posted:Terminator Genisys by Warlord Games has some nice minis. Should be rather cheap to find. It's been going for dirtcheap on Warlord, I think they're dropping support - they're the retailer, the game is by River Horse Studios. A shame, as I've really enjoyed the few games I've played of it.
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Feb 16, 2017 18:28
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Mr.Trifecta posted:Got an email yesterday that Giant Killer Robots: Heavy Hitters is coming to KSer in a week or so. I am curious on the product differences then what I saw at Gen Con. Also games made by WETA. I dearly want this to be good because I do love giant killer robots, but seeing Cryptozoic involves immediately makes me leery. Are they involved on the design end of things or simply publishing?
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Feb 16, 2017 20:01
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Kai Tave posted:I dearly want this to be good because I do love giant killer robots, but seeing Cryptozoic involves immediately makes me leery. Are they involved on the design end of things or simply publishing? I want to say publishing side. Can't say for certain if they dipped in creative.
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Feb 16, 2017 20:39
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Will be interesting to see what the shipping costs come out like. I'd assume relatively little of the final product would be produced in NZ so it could end up cheaper for those in NZ to wait for it to appear in the Weta Workshop store.
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Feb 16, 2017 20:44
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Man vs. Meeple has a preview of Giant Killer Robots up btw, based on a not-finalized version. It looks...okay? Like all Cryptozoic games it looks like dice are going to be a heavy component of task resolution for things like shooting and defending, though they say that there's stuff that's going to be added to the final game, namely unique pilots and in-game achievements/objectives, which might mitigate some of that? Gonna take a wait-and-see approach with this one.
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Feb 16, 2017 20:48
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Mr.Trifecta posted:Got an email yesterday that Giant Killer Robots: Heavy Hitters is coming to KSer in a week or so. I am curious on the product differences then what I saw at Gen Con. Also games made by WETA. Weta makes great props. Not really sure that translates to game design. And Cryptozoic is notoriously poo poo at making good games.
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Feb 16, 2017 21:00
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Evil Mastermind posted:The Watch: a PbtA game about soldiers fighting a desperate war to save their homeland Interestingly I will be playing this at Breakout con and the session will be run by Anna Kreider herself.
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Feb 16, 2017 21:07
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The_Doctor posted:Another big 'but why?'. The Terminator: The Board Game has launched. The simultaneous boards thing sounds pretty neat to me. Also the $70 tier getting you both boxes already sold out with 1700 backers. Yeesh. I probably won't back it because I have too many games, but I dunno, could be fun!
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Feb 16, 2017 21:20
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Japanese Dating Sim posted:The simultaneous boards thing sounds pretty neat to me. Also the $70 tier getting you both boxes already sold out with 1700 backers. Yeesh. I just made it grabbing the 70$ level.
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Feb 16, 2017 23:08
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Evil Mastermind posted:The great thing about all these licensed games is that they don't have to be that good because I'm sure a large percentage of the backers are just getting them for the minis. those are some really lovely mockups tho
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Feb 16, 2017 23:52
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